When people talk about world-class engineering orgs, they often have in mind teams that are top-heavy with staff and principal engineers, or recruiting heavily from the ranks of ex-FAANG employees or top universities. But I would argue that a truly great engineering org is one where you don't HAVE to be one of the “best” or most pedigreed engineers in the world to get shit done and have a lot of impact on the business. I think it’s actually the other way around. A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent software engineering skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they've built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.